Discord to ensure «safe» communities by buying AI tool
Messaging service Discord has acquired Sentropy. Sentropy offers a tool to detect and filter abuse or harassment in online networks – using artificial intelligence.
Sentropy Protect has been available for about a year. The company, only around three years old, uses the tool to help companies moderate their communities. However, these services should soon disappear from the market. The option for private users has even been offline since the beginning of July. This is probably due to the recently announced merger with Discord.
In a blog post on Sentropy’s site, company CEO and co-founder John Redgrave wrote that the company’s services were no longer intended to help out individual social network providers. Instead, the expertise gained will now be prioritised for Discord. However, he also hinted that previous experiences would be used for building and operating secure and «safe» online spaces.
We are excited to help Discord decide how we can most effectively share with the rest of the Internet the best practices, technology, and tools that we’ve developed to protect our own communities.
It is unknown how much money Discord spent on acquiring Sentropy. Regardless, the acquisition underscores Discord’s efforts to better identify and remove bad user behaviour. Discord, which became big in gaming and is still the market leader there, has more than 150 million monthly active users. Spread out across more than 19 million individual communities of all sizes. Volunteers and moderation staff work around the clock to keep the system running smoothly. In May 2020, according to the website TechCrunch, Discord’s «Trust and Safety Team» made up as much as 15 per cent of its entire workforce.
Previous moderation mostly involved real humans
So far, Discord has taken a tiered approach to moderation. An internal human moderation team is supported by volunteer moderators and admins who define ground rules for individual servers.
In the future, Sentropy’s solutions will be integrated. Which should make economic sense, as the cost of human moderation will probably go down. With the acquisition, Discord can also prove it’s serious about erasing its grubby image.
This flawed reputation is based primarily on incidents from 2018. At the time, Discord was a stomping ground for right-wing extremists, then implicated in the death of an anti-racist demonstrator at rallies in Charlottesville, USA. Only after that did Discord seriously start airing out its platform. It deleted neo-Nazi and racist communities. On the way to becoming a mainstream social portal, Discord managers seem to have realised that user trust and security are vital for further growth.
In the spring of 2021, Discord was even relevant enough for Microsoft to make a takeover bid. A sum somewhere around 10 billion US dollars was reported. Discord, however, refused it.
PS: You can also find digitec on Discord. Here users exchange ideas with our gaming experts. The cover image for this article is also a screenshot of this group.
P.P.S.: In our case, your comments are moderated by real people. So be kind and decent. Thanks.
Journalist since 1997. Stopovers in Franconia (or the Franken region), Lake Constance, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zurich. Father since 2014. Expert in editorial organisation and motivation. Focus on sustainability, home office tools, beautiful things for the home, creative toys and sports equipment.